Netgear R6100 Wi-Fi Router Review – 802.11AC Wireless For Under $100

Netgear R6100 – Wireless 802.11ac Tests

For our next test, we turned off the built-in Wi-Fi on our Alienware M17XR4 and connected it to a Netgear R6300 802.11ac Router configured as a Bridge to each of the wireless AC routers (Netgear R6100 and Netgear R6300) in our test. Let’s check out what true 802.11ac wireless networking can do. Again, we used LAN Speed Test (LST) to check the throughput of our 1MB and 100MB data packets.

Benchmark Results: Once again we see the Netgear R6100 reach a sort of ‘saturation point’ with the router’s wireless speeds topping out at just under 90 Mbps. Meanwhile, the Netgear R6300 performs more than 300% faster than that of the Netgear R6100 router who is limited by the lack of Gigabit Ethernet.

Benchmark Results: Taking a look at the larger data packet sizes, we see once again the large difference in performance numbers. While the Netgear R6300 is in line with speeds that we would normally expect from 802.11ac routers, the R6100 is clearly lacking something.